It’s been awhile since a new post again, but I’ve been heads down on a new project at work. With a new project, comes new TIL’s! Today we’re going to talk about a clever caching concept called Donut Caching.

A number of the new APIs and projects I’m working with include some level of searchable index, using utilities like Lucene, ElasticSearch, and Nest. I know absolutely nothing about these things, so I decided to go on a bit of a fact-finding mission to get myself more acquainted. Starting at the basics, I first learned about Search Indexing.

While browsing / playing in some other teams’ projects in our company, I stumbled across a neat construct that I hadn’t seen before in unit tests – Simply Test Data. Using this framework you can construct some fake objects in a fluent and easy to read manner.

Last week I went over some basic Selenium, showing how you can write tests that can be run against any browser. Today I’m going to highlight some of the more powerful things you can do with Selenium in your integration tests, from automatically finding page elements to executing arbitrary strings of javascript!

I’ve been using Selenium for a few years now to write web integration tests, and just realized that I hadn’t really blogged about it. So, here’s a quick rundown of Selenium Web Driver in C# and how it can be used to automate your web page testing.

I tweeted last week that I was starting to fall for JsonConfig, a configuration framework written by Timo Dorr for .NET. It’s a great utility that uses Json files to give you an object-based configuration (that’s right, NESTED VALUES!) and uses .net’s dynamic objects to provide it.

It’s been almost a full month since I’ve blogged, and a month and a half since I’ve actually written anything! I blame presentations and new projects at work (and reddit… damn you /r/boardgames!). Regardless, I’ve got a list of TILs and articles I’ve been meaning to write, so look here for the next few days for new content! Today we’ll be talking about T4MVC templates, a neat way to remove those magic strings from your ASP.NET MVC code.

I’m no powershell pro by any means, but I did manage to scrape together a “setup script” of sorts to help devs on our team set up their newly formatted laptops with all the source code and IIS settings required to work on our projects. Recently we had to add some sql queries to the script – here’s how I did it!